CHAPTER 27
Saturday, July 26–Monday, July 28
Blomkvist picked up Salander by her front door on Lundagatan at 10:00 and drove her to the Norra crematorium. He stayed at her side during the ceremony. For a long time they were the only mourners along with the pastor, but when the funeral began Armansky slipped in. He nodded curtly to Blomkvist and stood behind Salander, gently putting a hand on her shoulder. She nodded without looking at him, as if she knew who was standing there. Then she ignored them both.
Salander had told him nothing about her mother, but the pastor had apparently spoken to someone at the nursing home where she died, and Blomkvist understood that the cause of death was a cerebral haemorrhage. Salander did not say a word during the ceremony. The pastor lost her train of thought twice when she turned directly to her. Salander looked her straight in the eye without expression. When it was over she turned on her heel and left without saying thank you or goodbye. Blomkvist and Armansky took a deep breath and looked at each other.
“She’s feeling really bad,” Armansky said.
“I know that,” Blomkvist said. “It was good of you to come.”
“I’m not so sure about that.”
Armansky fixed Blomkvist with his gaze.
“If you two are driving back north, keep an eye on her.”
He promised to do that. They said goodbye, and to the pastor, at the church door. Salander was already in the car, waiting.
She had to go back with him to Hedestad to get her motorcycle and the equipment she had borrowed from Milton Security. Not until they had passed Uppsala did she break her silence and ask how the trip to Australia had gone. Blomkvist had landed at Arlanda late the night before and had slept only a few hours. During the drive he told her Harriet Vanger’s story. Salander sat in silence for half an hour before she opened her mouth.
“Bitch,” she said.
“Who?”
“Harriet Fucking Vanger. If she had done something in 1966, Martin Vanger couldn’t have kept killing and raping for thirty-seven years.”
“Harriet knew about her father murdering women, but she had no idea that Martin had anything to do with it. She fled from a brother who raped her and then threatened to reveal that she had drowned her father if she didn’t do what he said.”
“Bullshit.”
After that they sat in silence all the way to Hedestad. Blomkvist was late for his appointment and dropped her at the turnoff to Hedeby Island; he asked if she would please be there when he came back.
“Are you thinking of staying overnight?” she said.
“I think so.”
“Do you want me to be here?”
He climbed out of the car and went around and put his arms around her. She pushed him away, almost violently. Blomkvist took a step back.
“Lisbeth, you’re my friend.”
“Do you want me to stay here so you’ll have somebody to fuck tonight?”
Blomkvist gave her a long look. Then he turned and got into the car and started the engine. He wound down the window. Her hostility was palpable.
“I want to be your friend,” he said. “If you want otherwise, then you don’t need to be here when I get home.”
Henrik Vanger was sitting up, dressed, when Dirch Frode let him into the hospital room.
“They’re thinking of letting me out for Martin’s funeral tomorrow.”
“How much has Dirch told you?”
Henrik looked down at the floor.
“He told me about what Martin and Gottfried got up to. This is far, far worse than I could have imagined.”
“I know what happened to Harriet.”
“Tell me: how did she die?”
“She didn’t die. She’s still alive. And if you like, she really wants to see you.”
Both men stared at him as if their world had just been turned upside down.
“It took a while to convince her to come, but she’s alive, she’s doing fine, and she’s here in Hedestad. She arrived this morning and can be here in an hour. If you want to see her, that is.”
Blomkvist had to tell the story from beginning to end. A couple of times Henrik interrupted with a question or asked him to repeat something. Frode said not a word.
When the story was done, Henrik sat in silence. Blomkvist had been afraid that it would be too much for the old man, but Henrik showed no sign of emotion, except that his voice might have been a bit thicker when he broke his silence
“Poor, poor Harriet. If only she had come to me.”
Blomkvist glanced at the clock. It was five minutes to four.
“Do you want to see her? She’s still afraid that you won’t want to after you found out what she did.”
“What about the flowers?” Henrik said.
“I asked her that on the plane coming home. There was one person in the family, apart from Anita, whom she loved, and that was you. She, of course, was the one who sent the flowers. She said that she hoped you would understand that she was alive and that she was doing fine, without having to make an appearance. But since her only channel of information was Anita, who moved abroad as soon as she finished her studies and never visited Hedestad, Harriet’s awareness about what went on here was limited. She never knew how terribly you suffered or that you thought it was her murderer taunting you.”
“I assume it was Anita who posted the flowers.”
“She worked for an airline and flew all over the world. She posted them from wherever she happened to be.”
“But how did you know Anita was the one who helped her?”
“She was the one in Harriet’s window.”
“But she could have been mixed up in…she could have been the murderer instead. How did you find out that Harriet was alive?”
Blomkvist gave Henrik a long look. Then he smiled for the first time since he had returned to Hedestad.
“Anita was involved in Harriet’s disappearance, but she couldn’t have killed her.”
“How could you be sure of that?”
“Because this isn’t some damned locked-room mystery novel. If Anita had murdered Harriet, you would have found the body years ago. So the only logical thing was that she helped Harriet escape and hide. Do you want to see her?”
“Of course I want to see her.”
Blomkvist found Harriet by the lift in the lobby. At first he did not recognise her. Since they had parted at Arlanda Airport the night before she had dyed her hair brown again. She was dressed in black trousers, a white blouse, and an elegant grey jacket. She looked radiant, and Blomkvist bent down to give her an encouraging hug.
Henrik got up from his chair when Mikael opened the door. She took a deep breath.
“Hi, Henrik,” she said.
The old man scrutinised her from top to toe. Then Harriet went over and kissed him. Blomkvist nodded to Frode and closed the door.
Salander was not in the cottage when Blomkvist returned to Hedeby Island. The video equipment and her motorcycle were gone, as well as the bag with her extra clothes and her sponge bag. The cottage felt empty. It suddenly seemed alien and unreal. He looked at the stacks of paper in the office, which he would have to pack up in boxes and carry back to Henrik’s house. But he could not face starting the process. He drove to Konsum and bought bread, milk, cheese, and something for supper. When he returned he put on water for coffee, sat in the garden, and read the evening papers without thinking of anything else.
At 5:30 a taxi drove across the bridge. After three minutes it went back the way it came. Blomkvist caught a glimpse of Isabella Vanger in the back seat.
Around 7:00 he had dozed off in the garden chair when Frode woke him up.
“How’s it going with Henrik and Harriet?” he said.
“This unhappy cloud has its silver lining,” Frode said with a restrained smile. “Isabella, would you believe, came rushing into Henrik’s hospital room. She’d obviously seen that you’d come back and was completely beside herself. She screamed at him that there had to be an end to this outrageous fuss about her Harriet, adding that you were the one who drove her son to his death with your snooping.”
“Well, she’s right, in a way.”
“She commanded Henrik to dismiss you forthwith and run you off the property for good. And would he, once and for all, stop searching for ghosts.”
“Wow!”
“She didn’t even glance at the woman sitting beside the bed talking to Henrik. She must have thought it was one of the staff. I will never forget the moment when Harriet stood up and said, ‘Hello, Mamma.’”
“What happened?”
“We had to call a doctor to check Isabella’s vital signs. Right now she’s refusing to believe that it’s Harriet. You are accused of dragging in an impostor.”
Frode was on his way to visit Cecilia and Alexander to give them the news that Harriet had risen from the dead. He hurried away, leaving Blomkvist to his solitary musings.
Salander stopped and filled her tank at a petrol station north of Uppsala. She had been riding doggedly, staring straight ahead. She paid quickly and got back on her bike. She started it up and rode to the exit, where she stopped, undecided.
She was still in a terrible mood. She was furious when she left Hedeby, but her rage had slowly dissolved during the ride. She could not make up her mind why she was so angry with Blomkvist, or even if he was the one she was angry with.
She thought of Martin Vanger and Harriet Fucking Vanger and Dirch Fucking Frode and the whole damned Vanger clan sitting in Hedestad reigning over their little empire and plotting against each other. They had needed her help. Normally they wouldn’t even have said hello to her in the street, let alone entrust her with their repellent secrets.
Fucking riff-raff.
She took a deep breath and thought about her mother, whom she had consigned to ashes that very morning. She would never be able to mend things. Her mother’s death meant that the wound would never heal, since she would never now get an answer to the questions she had wanted to ask.
She thought about Armansky standing behind her at the crematorium. She should have said something to him. At least given him some sign that she knew he was there. But if she did that, he would have taken it as a pretext for trying to structure her life. If she gave him her little finger he’d take her whole arm. And he would never understand.
She thought about the lawyer, Bjurman, who was still her guardian and who, at least for the time being, had been neutralised and was doing as he was told.
She felt an implacable hatred and clenched her teeth.
And she thought about Mikael Blomkvist and wondered what he would say when he found out that she was a ward of the court and that her entire life was a fucking rats’ nest.
It came to her that she really was not angry with him. He was just the person on whom she had vented her anger when what she had wanted most of all was to murder somebody, several people. Being angry with him was pointless.
She felt strangely ambivalent towards him.
He stuck his nose in other people’s business and poked around in her life and…but…she had also enjoyed working with him. Even that was an odd feeling—to work with somebody. She wasn’t used to that, but it had been unexpectedly painless. He did not mess with her. He did not try to tell her how to live her life.
She was the one who had seduced him, not vice versa.
And besides, it had been satisfying.
So why did she feel as if she wanted to kick him in the face?
She sighed and unhappily raised her eyes to see an inter-continental roar past on the E4.
Blomkvist was still in the garden at 8:00 when he was roused by the rattle of the motorcycle crossing the bridge and saw Salander riding towards the cottage. She put her bike on its stand and took off her helmet. She came up to the garden table and felt the coffeepot, which was empty and cold. Blomkvist stood up, gazing at her in surprise. She took the coffeepot and went into the kitchen. When she came back out she had taken off her leathers and sat down in jeans and a T-shirt with the slogan I CAN BE A REGULAR BITCH. JUST TRY ME.
“I thought you’d be in Stockholm by now,” he said.
“I turned round in Uppsala.”
“Quite a ride.”
“I’m sore.”
“Why did you turn around?”
No answer. He waited her out while they drank coffee. After ten minutes she said, reluctantly, “I like your company.”
Those were words that had never before passed her lips.
“It was…interesting to work with you on this case.”
“I enjoyed working with you too,” he said.
“Hmm.”
“The fact is, I’ve never worked with such a brilliant researcher. OK, I know you’re a hacker and hang out in suspect circles in which you can set up an illegal wiretap in London in twenty-four hours, but you get results.”
She looked at him for the first time since she had sat at the table. He knew so many of her secrets.
“That’s just how it is. I know computers. I’ve never had a problem with reading a text and absorbing what it said.”
“Your photographic memory,” he said softly.
“I admit it. I just have no idea how it works. It’s not only computers and telephone networks, but the motor in my bike and TV sets and vacuum cleaners and chemical processes and formulae in astrophysics. I’m a nut case, I admit it: a freak.”
Blomkvist frowned. He sat quietly for a long time.
Asperger’s syndrome, he thought. Or something like that. A talent for seeing patterns and understanding abstract reasoning where other people perceive only white noise.
Salander was staring down at the table.
“Most people would give an eye tooth to have such a gift.”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“We’ll drop it. Are you glad you came back?”
“I don’t know. Maybe it was a mistake.”
“Lisbeth, can you define the word friendship for me?”
“It’s when you like somebody.”
“Sure, but what is it that makes you like somebody?”
She shrugged.
“Friendship—my definition—is built on two things,” he said. “Respect and trust. Both elements have to be there. And it has to be mutual. You can have respect for someone, but if you don’t have trust, the friendship will crumble.”
She was still silent.
“I understand that you don’t want to discuss yourself with me, but someday you’re going to have to decide whether you trust me or not. I want us to be friends, but I can’t do it all by myself.”
“I like having sex with you.”
“Sex has nothing to do with friendship. Sure, friends can have sex, but if I had to choose between sex and friendship when it comes to you, there’s no doubt which I would pick.”
“I don’t get it. Do you want to have sex with me or not?”
“You shouldn’t have sex with people you’re working with,” he muttered. “It just leads to trouble.”
“Did I miss something here, or isn’t it true that you and Erika Berger fuck every time you get the chance? And she’s married.”
“Erika and I…have a history that started long before we started working together. The fact that she’s married is none of your business.”
“Oh, I see, all of a sudden you’re the one who doesn’t want to talk about yourself. And there I was, learning that friendship is a matter of trust.”
“What I mean is that I don’t discuss a friend behind her back. I’d be breaking her trust. I wouldn’t discuss you with Erika behind your back either.”
Salander thought about that. This had become an awkward conversation. She did not like awkward conversations.
“I do like having sex with you,” she said.
“I like it too…but I’m still old enough to be your father.”
“I don’t give a shit about your age.”
“No, you can’t ignore our age difference. It’s no sort of basis for a lasting relationship.”
“Who said anything about lasting?” Salander said. “We just finished up a case in which men with fucked-up sexuality played a prominent role. If I had to decide, men like that would be exterminated, every last one of them.”
“Well, at least you don’t compromise.”
“No,” she said, giving him her crooked non-smile. “But at least you’re not like them.” She got up. “Now I’m going in to take a shower, and then I think I’ll get into your bed naked. If you think you’re too old, you’ll have to go and sleep on the camp bed.”
Whatever hang-ups Salander had, modesty certainly was not one of them. He managed to lose every argument with her. After a while he washed up the coffee things and went into the bedroom.
They got up at 10:00, took a shower together, and ate breakfast out in the garden. At 11:00 Dirch Frode called and said that the funeral would take place at 2:00 in the afternoon, and he asked if they were planning to attend.
“I shouldn’t think so,” said Mikael.
Frode asked if he could come over around 6:00 for a talk. Mikael said that would be fine.
He spent a few hours sorting the papers into the packing crates and carrying them over to Henrik’s office. Finally he was left with only his own notebooks and the two binders about the Hans-Erik Wennerström affair that he hadn’t opened in six months. He sighed and stuffed them into his bag.
Frode rang to say he was running late and did not reach the cottage until 8:00. He was still in his funeral suit and looked harried when he sat down on the kitchen bench and gratefully accepted the cup of coffee that Salander offered him. She sat at the side table with her computer while Blomkvist asked how Harriet’s reappearance had been received by the family as a whole.
“You might say that it has overshadowed Martin’s demise. Now the media have found out about her too.”
“And how are you explaining the situation?”
“Harriet talked with a reporter from the Courier. Her story is that she ran away from home because she didn’t get along with her family, but that she obviously has done well in the world since she’s the head of a very substantial enterprise.”
Blomkvist whistled.
“I discovered that there was money in Australian sheep, but I didn’t know the station was doing that well.”
“Her sheep station is going superbly, but that isn’t her only source of income. The Cochran Corporation is in mining, opals, manufacturing, transport, electronics, and a lot of other things too.”
“Wow! So what’s going to happen now?”
“Honestly, I don’t know. People have been turning up all day, and the family has been together for the first time in years. They’re here from both Fredrik and Johan Vanger’s sides, and quite a few from the younger generation too—the ones in their twenties and up. There are probably around forty Vangers in Hedestad this evening. Half of them are at the hospital wearing out Henrik; the other half are at the Grand Hotel talking to Harriet.”
“Harriet must be the big sensation. How many of them know about Martin?”
“So far it’s just me, Henrik, and Harriet. We had a long talk together. Martin and…your uncovering of his unspeakable life, it’s overshadowing just about everything for us at the moment. It has brought an enormous crisis for the company to a head.”
“I can understand that.”
“There is no natural heir, but Harriet is staying in Hedestad for a while. The family will work out who owns what, how the inheritance is to be divided and so on. She actually has a share of it that would have been quite large if she had been here the whole time. It’s a nightmare.”
Mikael laughed. Frode was not laughing at all.
“Isabella had a collapse at the funeral. She’s in the hospital now. Henrik says he won’t visit her.”
“Good for Henrik.”
“However, Anita is coming over from London. I am to call a family meeting for next week. It will be the first time in twenty-five years that she’s participated.”
“Who will be the new CEO?”
“Birger is after the job, but he’s out of the question. What’s going to happen is that Henrik will step in as CEO pro tem from his sickbed until we hire either someone from outside or someone from within the family…”
Blomkvist raised his eyebrows.
“Harriet? You can’t be serious.”
“Why not? We’re talking about an exceptionally competent and respected businesswoman.”
“She has a company in Australia to look after.”
“True, but her son Jeff Cochran is minding the store in her absence.”
“He’s the studs manager on a sheep ranch. If I understood the matter correctly, he sees to it that the correct sheep mate with each other.”
“He also has a degree in economics from Oxford and a law degree from Melbourne.”
Blomkvist thought about the sweaty, muscular man with his shirt off who had driven him into and through the ravine; he tried to imagine him in a pinstripe suit. Why not?
“All of this will take time to work out,” Frode said. “But she would be a perfect CEO. With the right support team she could represent a whole new deal for the company.”
“She doesn’t have the experience…”
“That’s true. She can’t just pop up out of more or less nowhere and start micro-managing the company. But the Vanger Corporation is international, and we could certainly have an American CEO who doesn’t speak a word of Swedish…it’s only business, when all’s said and done.”
“Sooner or later you’re going to have to face up to the problem of Martin’s basement.”
“I know. But we can’t say anything without destroying Harriet…I’m glad I’m not the one who has to make the decision about this.”
“Damn it, Dirch, you won’t be able to bury the fact that Martin was a serial killer.”
“Mikael, I’m in a…very uncomfortable position.”
“Tell me.”
“I have a message from Henrik. He thanks you for the outstanding work you did and says that he considers the contract fulfilled. That means he is releasing you from any further obligations and that you no longer have to live or work here in Hedestad, etc. So, taking effect immediately, you can move back to Stockholm and devote yourself to your other pursuits.”
“He wants me to vanish from the scene, is that the gist of it?”
“Absolutely not. He wants you to visit him for a conversation about the future. He says he hopes that his involvement on the board of Millennium can proceed without restrictions. But…”
Frode looked even more uncomfortable, if that was possible.
“Don’t tell me, Dirch…he no longer wants me to write a history of the Vanger family.”
Dirch Frode nodded. He picked up a notebook, opened it, and pushed it over to Mikael.
“He wrote you this letter.”
Dear Mikael,
I have nothing but respect for your integrity, and I don’t intend to insult you by trying to tell you what to write. You may write and publish whatever you like, and I won’t exert any pressure on you whatsoever.
Our contract remains valid, if you want to continue. You have enough material to finish the chronicle of the Vanger family.
Mikael, I’ve never begged anyone for anything in my entire life. I’ve always thought that a person should follow his morals and his convictions. This time I have no choice.
I am, with this letter, begging you, both as a friend and as part owner of Millennium, to refrain from publishing the truth about Gottfried and Martin. I know that’s wrong, but I see no way out of this darkness. I have to choose between two evils, and in this case there are no winners.
I beg you not to write anything that would further hurt Harriet. You know first-hand what it’s like to be the subject of a media campaign. The campaign against you was of quite modest proportions. You can surely imagine what it would be like for Harriet if the truth were to come out. She has been tormented for forty years and shouldn’t have to suffer any more for the deeds that her brother and her father committed. And I beg you to think through the consequences this story might have for the thousands of employees in the company. This could crush her and annihilate us.
Henrik
“Henrik also says that if you require compensation for financial losses that may arise from your refraining from publishing the story, he is entirely open to discussion. You can set any financial demands you think fit.”
“Henrik Vanger is trying to shut me up. Tell him that I wish he had never given me this offer.”
“The situation is just as troublesome for Henrik as it is for you. He likes you very much and considers you his friend.”
“Henrik Vanger is a clever bastard,” Blomkvist said. He was suddenly furious. “He wants to hush up the story. He’s playing on my emotions and he knows I like him too. And what he’s also saying is that I have a free hand to publish, and if I do so he would have to revise his attitude towards Millennium.”
“Everything changed when Harriet stepped on to the stage.”
“And now Henrik is feeling out what my price tag might be. I don’t intend to hang Harriet out to dry, but somebody has to say something about the women who died in Martin’s basement. Dirch, we don’t even know how many women he tortured and slaughtered. Who is going to speak up on their behalf?”
Salander looked up from her computer. Her voice was almost inaudible as she said to Frode, “Isn’t there anyone in your company who’s going to try to shut me up?”
Frode looked astonished. Once again he had managed to ignore her existence.
“If Martin Vanger were alive at this moment, I would have hung him out to dry,” she went on. “Whatever agreement Mikael made with you, I would have sent every detail about him to the nearest evening paper. And if I could, I would have stuck him down in his own torture hole and tied him to that table and stuck needles through his balls. Unfortunately he’s dead.”
She turned to Blomkvist.
“I’m satisfied with the solution. Nothing we do can repair the harm that Martin Vanger did to his victims. But an interesting situation has come up. You’re in a position where you can continue to harm innocent women—especially that Harriet whom you so warmly defended in the car on the way up here. So my question to you is: which is worse—the fact that Martin Vanger raped her out in the cabin or that you’re going to do it in print? You have a fine dilemma. Maybe the ethics committee of the Journalists Association can give you some guidance.”
She paused. Blomkvist could not meet her gaze. He stared down at the table.
“But I’m not a journalist,” she said at last.
“What do you want?” Dirch Frode asked.
“Martin videotaped his victims. I want you to do your damnedest to identify as many as you can and see to it that their families receive suitable compensation. And then I want the Vanger Corporation to donate 2 million kronor annually and in perpetuity to the National Organisation for Women’s Crisis Centres and Girls’ Crisis Centres in Sweden.”
Frode weighed the price tag for a minute. Then he nodded.
“Can you live with that, Mikael?” Salander said.
Blomkvist felt only despair. His professional life he had devoted to uncovering things which other people had tried to hide, and he could not be party to the covering up of the appalling crimes committed in Martin Vanger’s basement. He who had lambasted his colleagues for not publishing the truth, here he sat, discussing, negotiating even, the most macabre cover-up he had ever heard of.
He sat in silence for a long time. Then he nodded his assent.
“So be it,” Frode said. “And with regard to Henrik’s offer for financial compensation…”
“He can shove it up his backside, and Dirch, I want you to leave now. I understand your position, but right now I’m so furious with you and Henrik and Harriet that if you stay any longer we might not be friends any more.”
Frode made no move to go.
“I can’t leave yet. I’m not done. I have another message to deliver, and you’re not going to like this one either. Henrik is insisting that I tell you tonight. You can go up to the hospital and flay him tomorrow morning if you wish.”
Blomkvist looked up and stared at him.
Frode went on. “This has got to be the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life. But I think that only complete candour with all the cards on the table can save the situation now.”
“So it’s candour at last, is it?”
“When Henrik convinced you to take the job last Christmas,” Dirch said, ignoring his sarcasm, “neither he nor I thought that anything would come of it. That was exactly what he said, but he wanted to give it one last try. He had analysed your situation, particularly with the help of the report that Fröken Salander put together. He played on your isolation, he offered good pay, and he used the right bait.”
“Wennerström.”
Frode nodded.
“You were bluffing?”
“No, no,” Frode said.
Salander raised an eyebrow with interest.
“Henrik is going to make good on everything he promised. He’s arranging an interview and is going public with a direct assault on Wennerström. You can have all the details later, but roughly the situation is this: when Wennerström was employed in the finance department of the Vanger Corporation, he spent several million kronor speculating on foreign currency. This was long before foreign exchange futures became the rage. He did this without authority. One deal after another went bad, and he was sitting there with a loss of seven million kronor that he tried to cover up. Partly by cooking the books and partly by speculating even harder. It inevitably came to light and he was sacked.”
“Did he make any profit himself?”
“Oh yes, he made off with about half a million kronor, which ironically enough became the seed money for the Wennerström Group. We have documentation for all of this. You can use the information however you like, and Henrik will back up the accusations publicly. But…”
“But, and it’s a big but, Dirch, the information is worthless,” Blomkvist said, slamming his fist on the table. “It all happened thirty-plus years ago and it’s a closed book.”
“You’ll get confirmation that Wennerström is a crook.”
“That will annoy Wennerström when it comes out, but it won’t damage him any more than a direct hit from a peashooter. He’s going to shuffle the deck by putting out a press release saying that Henrik Vanger is an old has-been who’s still trying to steal some business from him, and then he’ll probably claim that he was acting on orders from Henrik. Even if he can’t prove his innocence, he can lay down enough smoke screens that no-one will take the story seriously.”
Frode looked unhappy.
“You conned me,” Blomkvist said.
“That wasn’t our intention.”
“I blame myself. I was grasping at straws, and I should have realised it was something like that.” He laughed abruptly. “Henrik is an old shark. He was selling a product and told me what I wanted to hear. It’s time you went, Dirch.”
“Mikael…I’m sorry that…”
“Dirch. Go.”
Salander did not know whether to go over to Blomkvist or to leave him in peace. He solved the problem for her by picking up his jacket without a word and slamming the door behind him.
For more than an hour she waited restlessly in the kitchen. She felt so bad that she cleared the table and washed the dishes—a role she usually left to Blomkvist. She went regularly to the window to see if there was any sign of him. Finally she was so nervous that she put on her jacket and went out to look for him.
First she walked to the marina, where lights were still on in the cabins, but there was no sign of him. She followed the path along the water where they usually took their evening walks. Martin Vanger’s house was dark and already looked abandoned. She went out to the rocks at the point where they had often sat talking, and then she went back home. He still had not returned.
She went to the church. Still no sign. She was at a loss to know what to do. Then she went back to her motor cycle and got a flashlight from the saddlebag and set off along the water again. It took her a while to wind her way along the half-overgrown road, and even longer to find the path to Gottfried’s cabin. It loomed out of the darkness behind some trees when she had almost reached it. He was not on the porch and the door was locked.
She had turned towards the village when she stopped and went back, all the way out to the point. She caught sight of Blomkvist’s silhouette in the darkness on the end of the jetty where Harriet Vanger had drowned her father. She sighed with relief.
He heard her as she came out on to the jetty, and he turned around. She sat down next to him without a word. At last he broke the silence.
“Forgive me. I had to be alone for a while.”
“I know.”
She lit two cigarettes and gave him one. Blomkvist looked at her. Salander was the most asocial human being he had ever met. Usually she ignored any attempt on his part to talk about anything personal, and she had never accepted a single expression of sympathy. She had saved his life, and now she had tracked him out here in the night. He put an arm around her.
“Now I know what my price is,” he said. “We’ve forsaken those girls. They’re going to bury the whole story. Everything in Martin’s basement will be vacuumed into oblivion.”
Salander did not answer.
“Erika was right,” he said. “I would have done more good if I’d gone to Spain for a month and then come home refreshed and taken on Wennerström. I’ve wasted all these months.”
“If you’d gone to Spain, Martin Vanger would still be operating in his basement.”
They sat together for a long time before he suggested that they go home.
Blomkvist fell asleep before Salander. She lay awake listening to him breathe. After a while she went to the kitchen and sat in the dark on the kitchen bench, smoking several cigarettes as she brooded. She had taken it for granted that Vanger and Frode might con him. It was in their nature. But it was Blomkvist’s problem, not hers. Or was it?
At last she made a decision. She stubbed out her cigarette and went into the bedroom, turned on the lamp, and shook Mikael awake. It was 2:30 in the morning.
“What?”
“I’ve got a question. Sit up.”
Blomkvist sat up, drunk with sleep.
“When you were indicted, why didn’t you defend yourself?”
Blomkvist rubbed his eyes. He looked at the clock.
“It’s a long story, Lisbeth.”
“I’ve got time. Tell me.”
He sat for a long while, pondering what he should say. Finally he decided on the truth.
“I had no defence. The information in the article was wrong.”
“When I hacked your computer and read your email exchange with Berger, there were plenty of references to the Wennerström affair, but you two kept discussing practical details about the trial and nothing about what actually happened. What was it that went wrong?”
“Lisbeth, I can’t let the real story get out. I fell into a trap. Erika and I are quite clear that it would damage our credibility even further if we told anyone what really happened.”
“Listen, Kalle Blomkvist, yesterday afternoon you sat here preaching about friendship and trust and stuff. I’m not going to put the story on the Net.”
Blomkvist protested. It was the middle of the night. He could not face thinking about the whole thing now. She went on stubbornly sitting there until he gave in. He went to the bathroom and washed his face and put the coffeepot on. Then he came back to the bed and told her about how his old schoolfriend Robert Lindberg, in a yellow Mälar-30 in the guest marina in Arholma, had aroused his curiosity.
“You mean that your buddy was lying?”
“No, not at all. He told me exactly what he knew, and I could verify each and every word in documents from the audit at SIB. I even went to Poland and photographed the sheet-metal shack where this huge big Minos Company was housed. I interviewed several of the people who had been employed at the company. They all said exactly the same thing.”
“I don’t get it.”
Blomkvist sighed. It was a while before he spoke again.
“I had a damned good story. I still hadn’t confronted Wennerström himself, but the story was airtight; if I had published it at that moment I really would have shook him up. It might not have led to an indictment for fraud—the deal had already been approved by the auditors—but I would have damaged his reputation.”
“What went wrong?”
“Somewhere along the way somebody heard about what I was poking my nose into, and Wennerström was made aware of my existence. And all of a sudden a whole bunch of strange things started happening. First I was threatened. Anonymous calls from card telephones that were impossible to trace. Erika was also threatened. It was the usual nonsense: lie down or else we’re going to nail you to a barn door, and so on. She, of course, was mad as a hellcat.”
He took a cigarette from Salander.
“Then something extremely unpleasant happened. Late one night when I left the office I was attacked by two men who just walked up to me and gave me a couple of punches. I got a fat lip and fell down in the street. I couldn’t identify them, but one of them looked like an old biker.”
“So, next…”
“All these goings-on, of course, only had the effect of making Erika very cross indeed, and I got stubborn. We beefed up security at Millennium. The problem was that the harassment was out of all proportion to the content of the story. We couldn’t fathom why all this was happening.”
“But the story you published was something quite different.”
“Exactly. Suddenly we made a breakthrough. We found a source, a Deep Throat in Wennerström’s circle. This source was literally scared to death, and we were only allowed to meet him in hotel rooms. He told us that the money from the Minos affair had been used for weapons deals in the war in Yugoslavia. Wennerström had been making deals with the right-wing Ustashe in Croatia. Not only that, the source was able to give us copies of documents to back it up.”
“You believed him?”
“He was clever. He only ever gave us enough information to lead us to the next source, who would confirm the story. We were even given a photograph of one of Wennerström’s closest colleagues shaking hands with the buyer. It was detailed blockbuster material, and everything seemed verifiable. So we published.”
“And it was a fake.”
“It was all a fake from beginning to end. The documents were skilful forgeries. Wennerström’s lawyer was able to prove that the photograph of Wennerström’s subordinate and the Ustashe leader was a montage of two different images.”
“Fascinating,” Salander said.
“In hindsight it was very easy to see how we had been manipulated. Our original story really had damaged Wennerström. Now that story was drowned in a clever forgery. We published a story that Wennerström could pick apart point by point and prove his innocence.”
“You couldn’t back down and tell the truth? You had absolutely no proof that Wennerström had committed the falsification?”
“If we had tried to tell the truth and accused Wennerström of being behind the whole thing, nobody would have believed us. It would have looked like a desperate attempt to shift the blame from our stupidity on to an innocent leader of industry.”
“I see.”
“Wennerström had two layers of protection. If the fake had been revealed, he would have been able to claim that it was one of his enemies trying to slander him. And we at Millennium would once again have lost all credibility, since we fell for something that turned out to be false.”
“So you chose not to defend yourself and take the prison sentence.”
“I deserved it,” Blomkvist said. “I had committed libel. Now you know. Can I go back to sleep now?”
He turned off the lamp and shut his eyes. Salander lay down next to him.
“Wennerström is a gangster.”
“I know.”
“No, I mean, I know that he’s a gangster. He works with everybody from the Russian mafia to the Colombian drug cartels.”
“What do you mean?”
“When I turned in my report to Frode he gave me an extra assignment. He asked me to try to find out what really happened at the trial. I had just started working on it when he called Armansky and cancelled the job.”
“I wonder why.”
“I assume that they scrapped the investigation as soon as you accepted Henrik Vanger’s assignment. It would no longer have been of immediate interest.”
“And?”
“Well, I don’t like leaving things unresolved. I had a few weeks…free last spring when Armansky didn’t have any jobs for me, so I did some digging into Wennerström for fun.”
Blomkvist sat up and turned on the lamp and looked at Salander. He met her eyes. She actually looked guilty.
“Did you find out anything?”
“I have his entire hard disk on my computer. You can have as much proof as you need that he’s a gangster.”